author's works

Martin Amis         Experience : A Memoir "We live in the age of mass loquacity," Martin Amis writes by way of introduction to Experience, thereby placing the reader in a curious bind. How to feel about a memoir by a writer who deplores our current enthusiasm for memoirs? Can such a public appeal for private life be convincing? The son of... Read more   Money : A Suicide Note Absolutely one of the funniest, smartest, meanest books I know. John Self, the Rabelaisian narrator of the novel, is an advertising man and director of TV commercials who lurches through London and Manhattan, eating, drinking, drugging and smoking too much, buying too much sex, and caring for little... Read more   London Fields (Vintage International) London Fields is Amis's murder story for the end of the millennium. The murderee is Nicola Six, a "black hole" of sex and self-loathing intent on orchestrating her own extinction. The murderer may be Keith Talent, a violent lowlife whose only passions are pornography and darts. Or is the killer the... Read more   Time's Arrow : Or the Nature of the Offense Amis attempts here to write a path into and through the inverted morality of the Nazis: how can a writer tell about something that's fundamentally unspeakable? Amis' solution is a deft literary conceit of narrative inversion. He puts two separate consciousnesses into the person of one man, ex-Nazi... Read more More Books by Martin Amis

articles and reviews

from THE NEW YORK TIMES - May 23, 2000 For Writers, Father and Son, Out of Conflict Grew Love EXPERIENCE With novels like ''London Fields,'' ''Money'' and ''The Information,'' Martin Amis has demonstrated that he is a writer equipped with a daunting arsenal of literary gifts: a dazzling, chameleonesque command of language, a willingness to tackle large issues and larger social canvases and an unforgiving, heat-seeking eye for the unwholesome ferment of contemporary life. The one thing lacking in his work, readers might have argued, was an emotional sincerity; too often his writing substituted sardonic detachment for heartfelt feeling, chilly postmodern pyrotechnics for a concern with what one of Mr. Amis's heroes, Saul Bellow, has called ''the mysterious circumstances of being."...[more] from THE NEW YORK TIMES - May 28, 2000 His Father's Son EXPERIENCE Martin Amis, son of Kingsley and likewise a novelist with acid in his inkwell, was greatly abused by the British press in the mid-1990's, when he left his wife, his agent and his country for another woman, a megabucks book deal and oral surgery so extravagant as to amount to urban renewal. Why Martin's mouth should have been of such consuming interest to anyone outside the broken family circle is a mystery. Nor is it any more exciting to read about in his memoir than it was in the tabs. Yet there is almost as much here about his teeth as there is about his father. This is unfortunate. ''Experience'' is a portmanteau of personal history, ancestor worship and promiscuous opinionizing, and a pinata of literary gossip that Amis beats with a stick, causing many names to drop. (Good names, too: Philip Larkin, Saul Bellow, Christopher Hitchens, Tina Brown and John Travolta. Did you know that Salman Rushdie went to a baseball game with Don DeLillo? That Ian McEwan used to have lunch with Thomas Pynchon?) And if we stay put till the last 100 pages, it will break our heart. But meanwhile we go far too often to the dentist... [more] from THE NEW YORK TIMES - January 27, 1998 Detective Mike Hoolihan? She's Tough NIGHT TRAIN Martin Amis's career is beginning to take the shape of Graham Greene's: bigger, ambitious novels interspersed with slighter ''entertainments,'' novels that extrapolate the author's distinctive social and moral vision interspersed with works that are more clearly exercises in craft. Between sprawling, minutely detailed epics of modern life like ''Money'' (1985), ''London Fields'' (1990) and ''The Information'' (1995), Mr. Amis has given us ''Einstein's Monsters'' (1987), a rather flimsy collection of stories linked by the theme of nuclear war; ''Time's Arrow'' (1991), a contrived tale of a Nazi-turned-fugitive told in reverse chronology, and now ''Night Train,'' a noirish mystery narrated by a hard-boiled cop... [more]

resources

Martin Amis's Books - Purchase at Amazon A Thriller With Something on Its Mind - 98.02 - Martin Amis is teetering on the edge of profundity The Martin Amis Web - "This site contains news, scholarship, interviews, reviews, criticism, bibliographies, and biographical information concerning Amis. It also features a discussion web for threaded discussion of Amis, his works, his contemporaries, and contemporary fiction." Help build the largest human-edited directory on the web. Submit a Site - Open Directory Project - Become an Editor Search for "Amis, Martin" on All the Web -  AltaVista -  Direct Hit -  Goto -  Infoseek -  LookSmart -  Webcrawler -  Yahoo!

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